Three prisoners broke out of a privately run, for-profit prison
in Kingman on July 30. Two were murderers. The third was convicted
of attempted murder.

Since their escape, they have been linked to the murder of an
elderly couple in New Mexico. The last of the escapees was captured
Friday in an Apache County, Ariz., campground with a cache of
weapons in his tent.

This chilling story has brought back into focus a question that
has been asked many times before: should Arizona rely on private
prisons to house violent criminals?

And it makes me wonder what Republican legislators were thinking
when they pushed a bill last year to privatize all our state
prisons, including those housing death row inmates.

Unfortunately, their hunger for prison privatization can be
attributed in large part to the oversized influence the private
prison industry exerts on the state Republican Party.

Jan Brewer's deputy chief of staff, Paul Senseman, is a former
lobbyist for private prisons, and his wife is currently a lobbyist.
Chuck Coughlin, her policy adviser, has a public relations firm
that also lobbies for the prisons.

Russell Pearce – yes, the same Russell Pearce who pushed through
SB1070 — is the legislative point man for private prisons. He has
received the maximum allowable campaign contributions from private
prison PACS as well as substantial donations from their
lobbyists.

• A car drove up to the prison perimeter, and a woman threw a
wire cutter over the fence. No one was guarding the perimeter. She
could have as easily thrown guns, knives or packages of drugs over
the fence.

• The prisoners walked through a door that was supposed to be
locked but was propped open with a rock. Then they cut through two
fences and walked out of the prison. No guards noticed the breech,
because the lights on the control panel monitoring the fence were
burnt out. And besides, there are so many false alarms at the
prison – 89 on the day of the breakout – that the guards stopped
paying attention to them.

• The prisoners' disappearance wasn't discovered until hours
later. Then the prison officials waited an hour before reporting
the break to the local sheriff's office. By that time, the escapees
and their accomplice were long gone.

The list of mistakes – tragic mistakes considering the escapees'
probable murder of the elderly couple in New Mexico – is too long
to be chalked up to human error. This is a case of systemic,
institutional failure.

One problem may be, the Kingman facility was designed to house
prisoners being held for drug and alcohol offenses, not murders.
Originally, those were the kind of inmates intended to be held in
private, for-profit prisons. Since then, it has been expanded and
holds over 100 lifer/murderers.

Many people believe the private prisons are understaffed with
lower paid, less well trained guards than state prisons. It's hard
to get solid figures, however, since the state doesn't monitor the
private facilities on a regular basis.

You have to question whether a prison run on the profit motive,
where a dollar saved is a dollar profit, should be responsible for
housing dangerous, violent offenders.

Other states have cut back on private prisons because evidence
shows them to be less secure than state prisons, and any savings to
the state – if indeed there are savings – are minimal.

Yet our Republican legislature is trying to move the entire
prison system into private hands, including prisoners on death row,
something no other state has tried.

It's time to step back from the precipice before we put another
dangerous criminal into a private prison. Arizona's citizens need
to better understand the consequences of this rush to privatization
before stories like that of the "Kingman 3" become a regular
occurrence.